A teenage girl from Rotherham who was gang raped in a forest became pregnant during the sex attack, a court heard.

It is alleged that the girl, who was about 14 at the time, was driven to Sherwood Forest by defendants Nabeel Kurshid and Iqlak Yousaf along with a third man, some time between August 2002 and August 2003 and was threatened with being abandoned there if she failed to comply.

Six of the defendants involved in the child sexual exploitation trial at Sheffield Crown Court

"She was passed from one group of Asian males to another and, over time, was very seriously abused," she added.

Kurshid and Yousaf both deny raping the girl.

They are among eight men on trial accused of child sexual exploitation in Rotherham more than a decade ago.

Jurors were told that teenage girls subjected to sexual exploitation in Rotherham were easy to target because they needed to be loved.

The prosecutor told how girls were ‘lured by the excitement of friendship with older Asian youths’ but then sexually assaulted and passed between men.

Ms Colborne QC told Sheffield Crown Court how the trial involves what allegedly happened to five girls, who are now women in their 30s, between 1998 and 2005.

She said: "When they were in their teens, they were targeted, sexualised and, in some instances, subjected to acts of a degrading and violent nature at the hands of these men who sit in the dock."

Ms Colborne said the girls had unsettled home lives and were initially ‘lured by the excitement of friendship with older Asian youths’.

"None of them had the maturity to understand that they were being groomed and exploited," she added.

The prosecutor said they ‘believed sex of some kind or other was a necessary price for friendship’.

Ms Colborne said: "They were powerless to do anything about it."

The jury was told how girls were given alcohol and drugs before they were passed between men in the town.

"They each suffer the emotional effects of that abuse to this day," she said.

The prosecutor said that two of the complainants are sisters who were ‘effectively abandoned’ by both their parents when they were very young.

She said: "The girls were enthralled by older, Asian men, men who had cars and seemed exciting to them.

"They thought they were living the high life."

Ms Colborne said they were ‘frequently in cars stopped by the police but this did not deter the abusers’.

She told the jury that the sisters ‘had already been corrupted’ when they allegedly came to the attention of two of the defendants, Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar and Tanweer Ali.

The previous exploitation had begun when one of them was as young as 11, she said.

The prosecutor said: "These sisters, like so many others, were easy to exploit because they needed to be loved."

Mohammed Imran Ali Akhtar, 37, of East Road, East Dene, Rotherham, denies one rape, one charge of aiding and abetting rape, four indecent assaults, one charge of procuring a girl under 21 to have unlawful sexual intercourse with another, one sexual assault and one charge of supplying cannabis.